TLDR:
seriously, don’t take any of it too seriously
I’ve long been a strategist at senior level in the Voluntary and Community Sector (read: Charities & not-for-private-profit organisations) in the UK, with particular emphasis on improving wellbeing for our beneficiaries/ service users/ clients/ customers = people we work with.
I’ve been Chief Executive of several mid-size charities: my first in Birmingham in the 1980s, my last was one working with and for older people across Berkshire in the 2010s. I’ve even done very brief time for the local Library Service.
So, despite the expected retirement age arriving a few years ago, I’m very pleased to still be working for the excellent inVOLve Community Services as Trustee Recruitment & Governance Lead, helping to improve charity governance in voluntary and community organisations across the Thames Valley, looking to encourage more-diverse trustee recruitment, as well as providing training, support and governance advice to trustees and other not-for-personal-profit organisations.
And, I’m privileged to have spent some very useful time as the Chair of Home-Start Surrey Heath, an excellent charity supporting families with children under five, in Camberley and surrounds, and now as a trustee of Swarthmore Care Home in Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire.
Of course, with all this part-time, partial-retirement, lazing about in the garden is also easily enough for me, with a fair-sized garden in Bracknell, Berkshire, south of the Thames.
Born south of the Thames in London, I studied Architecture in Portsmouth until the radical housing movement of the 1970s grabbed me, fired up my strongly left-of-centre politics and my voluntary work with communities. My paid career took off with Adventure Playwork, followed by Youth Work, then Youth Work management, community development, including assisting a Pakistani education organisation, dabbling in ICT strategy and ‘matrix management’ for a national housing charity, Chair of a Children’s Trust (while they still existed), CEO with an older people’s organisation in the Black Country and later for a charities-support organisation in the Midlands.
Along that path I acquired a post-graduate Youth & Community Work qualification from what is now the University of Greenwich, then an MBA from the University of Birmingham looking at social capital and connected communities, long before these days of always-connected and societally-compromising social media.
That’s all in far too much detail on LinkedIn.
Outside the Voluntary Sector, I have intense passions for music – currently from The Cowboy Junkies to Haim to Willis Earl Beal and Martha Wainwright via Bombino, Ásgeir Trausti, Captain Beefheart, and The Velveteen Orkestra – cooking, cheese, cats, cycling, cricket and chianti, although not in that order.
I also follow and wholeheartedly recommend the wonderful podcast series: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey, which you can listen to free-of-charge, although you should also join his Patreon for £12 or $12 per year for additional material.
If, for some strange reason known solely to you, you wish to contact me, it’s best to do so via LinkedIn, where I’ll probably respond soonish; or you can try mike at mike dash allen dot org dot uk or the contact page on this site which doesn’t yet exist or function 🙁